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Comment by notdrunkatall | Hacker News Reader

As a TSLA shareholder and as a general fan of the company, this is disappointing. TSLA's been doing everything right, which is what has given them so much momentum so early in the game, and if they are going to be the big disruptor that I'm betting on, they cannot afford to lose that momentum. If they start mis-stepping, they won't last long, and this is a misstep that many, many people at TSLA should have seen coming from many miles away.

Batteries suck in the cold. Did no one think to test the Model S in the east's freezing temperatures before they turned one over to a journalist?

What gives, Elon?

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There is no magic fix for this. It's like asking to turn off gravity and friction so you can have a more comfortable trip.

The reason for the big losses in the cold is the battery management system that is trying to keep the pack warm and has to expend energy to do so. You can opt not to do any battery management, but then you get thermal runaway and a life-threatening Boeing situation, or (in the cold) your battery pack is damaged.

They picked the best option there is under the circumstances.

Possible valid fixes:

- Have the reporting system look at current temperature and change the reported range.

- More supercharger stations closer together. (200 miles apart for a reported range of 268?! Ballsy. Especially in the extreme cold of the northeast. Reckless when you are giving a car to a NYTimes reviewer.)

- Don't have the parking brake LOCK so you can't even move the car without a flatbed truck.

- Have the car warn/inform the driver when they park somewhere cold to keep it plugged in to warm the battery up

and that's off the top of my head.

Many things can be done. This isn't necessarily a 'physics problem.' It's communicating and setting expectations. When the car says "100 miles" and you are stuck at the side of the road after 50 miles, it doesn't matter that "the physics make sense". What matters is you were screwed by completely false information.

The fix is simple. In fact, it's so simple, I would be SHOCKED if the TSLA guys aren't already including it in a future firmware update.

Even better would be to fetch the local weather forecast, and when temperatures are predicted to drop, to warn the driver and ask him to take a look at a line graph of temperature/charge as a function of time. At least that way, the driver will have an idea of what he should do.

No, they didn't. The best option would have been to test the car in real-world sub-freezing temperatures and to have worked out the bugs in how the system reports remaining charge to the driver.

Obviously, lithium batteries are going to lose charge in colder weather - that's just physics, but the problem here was twofold: one, the inherent limitation in the battery itself, but perhaps more importantly, how the car reports available charge to the driver in those conditions. If the car tells me that I have 100 miles to drive, I should have 100 miles left to drive. That it does not is a design flaw, and one that should not have been overlooked, plain and simple.

The major problem isn't the batteries. The problem is the lack of charging stations.

Even with batteries going down sooner than you expect, you could always recharge, if there was a charger in the same _city_.

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